This is a work-in-progress; expect it to be updated, changed, whatever, as time goes on.  If YOU have anything to contribute to this guide, please send it to me!

     You probably have enough information at hand to plan for a bike trip to a neighboring state or of a few hundred miles.  But what do you do if you've been bitten by the 'middle-aged crazy bug' and want to go motorcycle touring in a whole 'nother country?!?  What if you WANT to explore distant lands by motorcycle (or Hell, even by car) but you don't know anyone 'there' who can give you useful information before you leave?

      What I'm going to try to build here is a list of URLs which will take you to web sites with information to help you plan your 'long trip/trip of a lifetime'.  My links page shows places where you can sign up for motorcycle tours or lease bikes, should you decide, say, to fly from the U.K. to the Rocky Mountains in the western U.S.  On this page, I'll try to suggest some web sites that will help you with airlines, provide information about cities and states you'll encounter, and numerous bits and pieces like exchange rates, tipping, passport/visa requirements, and so forth.

     Please give me some feedback about this if you find it useful/useless, okay?  I have this itch to tour Australia or Ireland on a bike - I actually made this web site as part of my effort to tap into the Internet for information should I ever get the time and money to take the trip.

NOTE: I AM NOT BEING PAID BY ANY OF THESE WEB SITES AND THE OPINIONS ARE MINE OR THOSE OF ANY PEOPLE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THIS SITE.

     Look here for information about free e-mail, trip planning guides, maps and directions and restaurant guides.

     FREE E-MAIL:  You've already got e-mail, why do you need free e-mail?  Well, in many parts of the U.S., more and more public libraries, airports, and even urban coffee shops are starting to provide Internet access.  Now, since they don't connect you to your Internet Service Provider, you can't access mail from that ISP if you're at a library in Elko, Nevada.  However, if you set up a free e-mail account, you can send and receive e-mail from any computer that can connect you to a web.  Even if you spend a night with Aunt Gertie in Armpit, Nebraska, you can use her T1 high speed connection to surf over to your free e-mail account and send a note back to the kids, telling them how much of their inheritance you spent today.
     Another nice thing about these free e-mail sites is that if you drop AOL (who hasn't!) and switch to another ISP, you don't have to change your e-mail address - your free e-mail address is still out there, ready to send and receive e-mail.  You just go to that site and have your e-mail forwarded to your new ISP mailbox.  A downside to the free e-mail sites is that when you read your mail, you see ads on your page.  Some have more ads than others, in fact.  (The ads are not sent to people you e-mail; they appear at the top of the page on e-mail that you read, or else when you log out of your e-mail)  BUT THE ADS USUALLY DON'T APPEAR IF YOU FORWARD MAIL TO YOUR HOME ISP, and people receiving e-mail from you don't get ads, either. Another downside is how much (if any) you can "attach" to your mail.  Some limit you to NO ATTACHMENTS, others limit you to 500K, and so forth.  Finally, when you want to send e-mail to "Sexy Suzy SquidRider" at hotbikerbabes.com, you can send it from your free e-mail address and nobody at home knows what you've done! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.

• Net@ddress is a favorite of mine.  First, your address can be something like "panhead@usa.net" - I like the "usa.net" address; easy to remember, patriotic.  Second, you can have mail filtered and sorted - anything with "adv" in the subject goes to trash, stuff from kin goes to the inbox, yadda yadda yadda.  Anything NOT covered by a filter goes to the inbox, or you can forward it directly to your home e-mail address (when not touring).  Not too many ads on your mail when you use this service.  Also, it has a switch to make your e-mail private (very useful if you're at a public terminal) so no one can get on after you and go to your mailbox to read your mail.
    RECENT UPDATE - Please note! - Net@ddress recently changed its services and now you have to pay if you want them to automatically forward your e-mail (like, send it to your 'home' e-mail server). If you want to read it on their server (and see their ads), no cost.
 
• Iname of course is the free e-mail site I use for my 'personal' mail.  Works just like Net@ddress - only reason it's my 'personal' mailbox is because I signed up for it and sent that address to my friends before I found out about Net@ddress.
    RECENT UPDATE - Please note! - Iname recently changed its services and now you have to pay if you want to send out your e-mail from your iname account (instead of from a 'home' account like AOL). As long as you go to iname and read your mail or have it forwarded somewhere else, no cost.
 
  Lately (September, 1999) I've had a lot of problems when I go to the web site to read mail. Even on a T1 line, the wait for a page to load seems too long. If you get mail forwarded (to my current ISP address/mailbox), and send mail from your home (rather than from iname.com), you don't notice the delays since you don't go to the site to read/write e-mail. But when yah gotta go there . . .
  I think maybe Net@ddress is the better service if you're using it "on the road".
• Yahoo is one of several new starts (in the mail bidness).  Haven't evaluated it - I welcome any feedback from anyone who is using this service.
• Snap is another new start - it's part of the whole C|Net complex (check it out some time).   Like Yahoo, you can make Snap your home page, too, and customize it to provide the info you want to see (rather than take the generic stuff your ISP rams down your throat).
• Hotbot as an e-mail site doesn't impress me very much - I've been told that their ads are more intrusive and the limits on the size of attachments are very low.

     TRIP PLANNING GUIDES: Go to the Resources page for a link to trip planning software you can put on your own computer.  This section covers web sites that might help you plan for that big trip - airline and hotel reservations (if needed), places to stay, things to see, where to eat, and useful info like exchange rates, visa/passport requirements, and so on.   Most of the information here is primarily about cities/states/countries, not about some small, out-of-the-way hamlet in the Ozarks.
     ;Because of this urban bias, I was reluctant to add this info and these sites to mine but then I thought about the exhibit of motorcycles-as-art in New York (fall, 1998), Bike Week in Daytona Beach, Florida (annually in March) and the annual Rolling Thunder event in Washington, D.C. (annually the Sunday before Memorial Day).   What if you wanted to go to a distant city to see something like these, or to use as a base for your tour of the hinterlands - say you fly to Australia and plan to rent a bike to tour the east coast of Oz, for example, and plan to start from Sydney.  Guides here will help you get into Australia, find things in Sydney, and then help you plan for your trip along the coast.

• Travelocity is probably the best world-wide service available.  It has destination guides, reservations for airlines, hotels, etc., and recent news about the place you're going.  They want you to enroll as a 'member' - probably means you'll get junk e-mail ads (so get a free e-mail address and route all their mail to the trash folder!!).
• Fodors makes travel guides and its web site is a combination of the latest information you would get in one of those guides, plus a bit more.  You get a trip planner, restaurant guides, hotel info, and so on, world-wide.  You can make a mini-guide for a particular destination (99 currently, world-wide), getting them to recommend hotels for under a $100 and restaurants that serve Asian food and cost less than $15 (pretty detailed).
• Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel site has info on about 200 places worldwide, like a scaled down version of these first two sites.  Usual fare - lodging, eateries, things to see.
• TravelMaster is a pay site - if you do a lot of travelling, this might be worth while - it has downloadable files on everything from hotels to golf courses in 220 countries, lists of 70,000 places to stay, airline schedules, etc.  About $30 to join.
• All-Hotels is a world-wide guide to hotels, with the emphasis on "discounts".  It also has info on weather, local news, guides to services, and maps (from MapBlast), among other bits and pieces.  This site was easy to use to find cheap hotels in Daytona Beach, Florida, for Bike Week (every March).   Check out their "Florida" page to get an example of what they have for travellers.
• Hotels & Travel on the Net is like All-Hotels, but their database seems to have less information.  They use Yahoo's map service.  You have to 'drill down' several layers to get an info guide to Daytona Beach, for example.  They list Bed and Breakfast places - an alternative to Motel 6 on the super-slab, and have a section called "steals & deals".

     MAPS & DIRECTIONS:  I've got a link on my Lessons Learned & War Stories page to mapping sites on the Internet.  That covers the major players but there are two more that are not listed there.  These sites, and the ones in the other page can be used to get point-to-point maps or even street address to street address maps.  Unlike the trip planning software mentioned earlier, these web sites are (THEY SAY!) updated with current/new roads and speeds and so forth.  Since they're free, find one you like and is easy for you to use.

• Altavista's Travel Link is a relatively new mapping service from this search engine.
• Metro Navigator used to be a very useful site but the dang thing's been down for repairs since March, 1998.  If they get back up, they're pretty good for getting around in cities.

     RESTAURANT GUIDES:  This is mainly for the Gold Wing Restaurant Reviewers Assn. folks who visit this site.   I was in it for over 10 years and I'm here to tell you that those people "Ride to Eat, Eat to Ride".  'Course, I've seen some Harley drivers who obviously don't pass every restaurant . . .  

• USA City Link has more than restaurant info - it also has travel and tourism information for a very large number of US cities (plus links to chambers of commerce, tourist stuff, and so on).  They also have a good sampling of a variety of restaurants.